When Will We Ever Learn?
As Harry Redknapp emerges as the front runner for the England job, Jerry Lockspeiser wonders if we will ever learn from our mistakes.
11 Feb 2012, 09:30
Harry Redknapp
Pete Seeger’s 1960’s song ‘Where Have All the Flowers Gone’ is a poem about the futility of war which ends with the phrase ‘when will we ever learn’. His melancholic musing on our inability to learn from the past can just as well be applied to other areas of human experience. It doesn’t say much for our claim to be the brightest species that we simply do not learn.
Having suffered once or twice many animals learn pretty fast to avoid dangerous and negative experiences. Not us. How many times have those of us who enjoy a beer or a glass of wine said ’Never again, I am NEVER going to drink again’ as we feel like crap on a Sunday morning? But we do it again and again, often the very next weekend. The Martian observer would surely put us in the not too bright box.
Or take sovereign debt. In the current discussions over the Euro, Greece et al there are a few references to Argentina in the early 2000’s and one or two other examples but the fact is we do this all the time. It’s been going on not just for decades or centuries but millennia. Apparently the first recorded sovereign debt was in 377 BC- by the Greeks no less. That’s 2389 years ago, and we have been at it ever since. Amongst others, England defaulted 4 times before 1600, France eight times in the 230 years after 1558, Nigeria five times since 1960, China twice in the 20th century. And so it goes on. Infact few countries have not defaulted at some time, Belgium being the best at husbandry amongst Europe’s older nations in avoiding the ignominy thus far.
The same is true of stock market bubbles and crashes. The French and Louisiana, the Dutch and Tulips, the USA and dot com just for starters. Not forgetting housing bubbles which blow and burst. No matter what sphere of human activity, it seems we never learn.
Now the cry is for Harry Redknapp to become the England football manager. Do we really expect him to be our saviour? He is an affable cheery personality, not a tax cheat, his teams play attractive football and he is by all accounts a great motivator of players. But just as the bubbles burst, today’s enthusiasm is destined to turn to venom. We only have to look at the past. Fabio Capello was greeted positively on his appointment as a proven winner with a big brain and powerful authority. Despite winning a higher percentage of games than any other England manager his shock departure has not been greeted with outpourings of sorrow. Sven Goran Erikson was welcomed and initially did a brilliant job rescuing the team’s fortunes from the quagmire Kevan Keegan had got us into, before later failing and leaving amid derision and insinuations of sleeze. Keegan himself was a boy’s own appointment only to be cast down by the results during his term. Unless Harry turns out to be football’s Black Swan, it is sure as eggs are eggs that the same riches to rags fate awaits him. Where have all the flowers gone?
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